Encrypt software raid array

[giv-as-a-ciggy-kent]

Hi,

I have a WD Thunderbolt raid drive that I have configured in raid 1 with two 2TB disks. When I go to erase the drive, I cannot select HFS+ encrypted. I am able to Use APFS encrypted but this is a bad choice for mechanical hard disks. I am also unable to partition the volume.

Other than using a Veracrypt container which is extremely slow and kind of clunky in day to day use, is there any other way to use FileVault on these drives?

Supposedly other versions of MacOS can do core storage raid with encryption using terminal commands, but these appear to have been removed on Big Sur.

Another post I found mentioned creating an encrypted disk image and placing it on the drive, and mounting it when needed. This would work for me but I have no idea how to do it.

Thanks!

 

[appltech]

About that disk image.
Open Disk Utility. Select File at the top menu > New Image > Blank Image...
Name it, choose a size and where to store it. Select Encryption (AES-256 is more secure), next, you will create a password for it, remember it, as Finder would ask for it each time you try to mount the image. That's it.

 

[giv-as-a-ciggy-kent]

About that disk image.
Open Disk Utility. Select File at the top menu > New Image > Blank Image...
Name it, choose a size and where to store it. Select Encryption (AES-256 is more secure), next, you will create a password for it, remember it, as Finder would ask for it each time you try to mount the image. That's it.

Thanks for this. I just tried it and it worked great. Unfortunately the read/write speeds are extremely slow. 5MB/s write, 70MB/s read.

I think I will roll with a Veracrypt container. Inconvenient, sure, but it reads/writes at normal speeds.

 

[Xanderhoff]

That's interesting - why is APFS encrypted bad for mechanical drives?

Perhaps you could just encrypt the drive through disk utility and backup to that - would that not be sufficient?

 

[Honza1]

APFS is today Apple choice for all drives - including spinning drives. No idea how well it works with RAID disks, but while early on APFS was limited to SSDs only, now is suggested for all drive types.